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Antisemitism After September 11th

Introduction

To White supremacists across the United States, the September 11th
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were a cause for
celebration. On a radio broadcast that week, William Pierce, head of
the neonazi National Alliance, called the attacks “a direct consequence
of the American people permitting the Jews to control their government
and to use American strength to advance the Jews’ interests at
the expense of everyone else's interests.”[1] He victoriously
announced the dawn of a “new era,” in which Jewish money,
and Jewish manipulation of the media and the U.S. government are “no
longer are enough to guarantee the Jews’ continued hegemony.”[2]

James “Bo” Gritz, a Patriot Movement leader and former
Green Beret, suggested that it was the “high concentration of
influential Jews” that made New York and Washington, D.C., attractive
targets,[3] an idea echoed by the likes of Swiss neonazi Ahmed Huber
and the Posse Comitatus militia in jubilant references to the attacks
on “Jew York.”[4] As reports began to emerge of a surge
of anti-Muslim violence across the United States, World Church of the
Creator leader Matt Hale wrote to his listserve: “Now we have
to help channel this hatred toward the Jews.”[5] He urged his
followers to proselytize that the attacks were due to “the control
of the United States government by International Jewry and its lackeys.
Perhaps never before,” he added, “have people been so receptive
to our message.”[6]

The Great Conspiracy

Hale may have had his finger to the wind. On September 17th, the Lebanese
television station Al-Manar posted a story on its website claiming
that 4,000 Israelis were absent from their jobs at the World Trade
Center on September 11th, “based on hints from the Israeli General
Security Apparatus,” and that Israeli secret police prevented
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon from traveling to New York City the day
of the attacks.[7] The Anti- Defamation League (ADL) suggests that
this number may have been plucked from the Israeli Embassy’s
statement of concern about the 4,000 Israeli nationals residing in
New York City.[8] By the next morning, when the story reappeared on
an obscure U.S.-based website, the Information Times, it had become
4,000 Jews. Within days, the rumor appeared in newspapers and on listserves
around the world—in Russia's Pravda (later retracted), in papers
in Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia,[9] even circulating within the
American Left, in emails with such credulous introductory remarks as “interesting
but unconfirmed information.”[10]

According to Asghar Ali Engineer, a Bombay-based progressive scholar
and activist who is an expert on communal violence in India, a version
that the Mossad was responsible for the attacks was circulated broadly
on e-mail networks in India and was widely believed, “especially
among Muslims.”[11] Another version, accusing “Zionists” of
plotting the attacks, was posted on a website linked to a ministry
of the Qatar government.[12] The rumor made its way to jihad recruitment
rallies in Peshawar (the capital of Pakistan’s Pashtun-dominated
North West Frontier Province) in late September, where Allama Noorul
Haq Qadri, the Naib Amir of the Ahl-i-Sunnah Wal-Jamat called the attacks “a
conspiracy of Jews to pit America against the Muslim world,”[13]
and in Rawalpindi (in Pakistani Punjab) in October, where Jamiat Ulema
Islam (JUI) leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman explicitly blamed “the
Jews” for the September 11 attacks and urged a U.S. probe into
why 4,000 Jews were absent from the towers and why Sharon cancelled
his U.S. visit.[14] The Ahl-i-Sunnah and the JUI are two of the numerous
jihadi groups that first gained ground in Pakistan during the regime
of Gen. Zia ul Haq in the 1980s.[15] The JUI repeated these tales at
several other rallies in the following weeks, including one in Hyderabad
(in Sind province) where according to the Pakistani English-language
daily, the Dawn, a leader called on JUI workers “to eliminate
the American commandos and Jews.”[16] The rhetoric of Jewish
conspiracy had indeed found receptive audiences around the world.

Finally, it was adopted by the Taliban itself—in late November
2001, a Taliban security chief charged that the attacks were “the
work of Jews trying to blacken the name of Islam;”[17] an unsurprising
development, given that Osama bin Laden had long before dubbed his
forces “The World Islamic Front against Jews and Crusaders.[18]

The Question of Violence

But if the rhetoric conjured up dangerous images of Jewish conspiratorial
reach, it did not seem to be reflected in a dramatic rise in violence—at
least in the United States. An ADL national poll conducted in November
found no evidence suggesting that antisemitic attitudes had worsened
in the United States as a result of the September 11th events.[19]
The ADL documented one serious September 11–related attack: A
synagogue in Tacoma, Washington, was set on fire just days after being
sprayed with graffiti blaming Jews for the terrorist attacks. Still,
ADL spokeswoman Myrna Shinbaum says that there was no significant increase
in anti-Jewish hate incidents in the wake of September 11th.[20] In
fact, the ADL’s 2001 audit noted an 11 percent drop in anti-Jewish
incidents from 2000 to 2001, for a total of 1,432, including 555 acts
of vandalism and 877 acts of harassment or physical assault, with no
deaths.[21]

Contrast this number with those from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee, which recorded 520 violent attacks or explicitly violent
threats—including six murders—directed against Arab-Americans
in just the first two months after the World Trade Center attacks,
along with several hundred cases of employment discrimination, numerous
reports of racial profiling by police, and 27 airline expulsions in
the same period.[22] The Asian American Legal Defense and Education
Fund tracked an additional 77 violent attacks against South Asians
in the first month after September 11th.[23] Despite the popularity
of conspiracies involving Israel and “the Jews,” Muslims,
Arabs, and South Asians were overwhelmingly the targets of both street
level violence and public and private sector discrimination in the
United States.

But outside of the United States, many Jews and Jewish institutions
did become the targets of vicious post–September 11 violence.
The murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan
in February was the most notorious instance, and the most deeply disturbing.
Although Nafisa Hoodbhoy, a former reporter for the Dawn, has persuasively
argued that Pearl was singled out in great part for his investigations
into the complex ties between militant Islamic groups and Pakistani
intelligence agencies, it is almost impossible to believe that antisemitism
did not play a decisive role.[24] One of Pearl’s captors has
admitted that his kidnappers were specifically looking for a Jewish
victim. And reports that Pearl’s likely coerced last words, just
before his throat was cut, were “My father is a Jew, my mother
is a Jew, and I am a Jew,” indicated that it was Pearl’s
very Jewishness that his captors sought to annihilate.[25]

An attack in Tunisia produced the highest death toll of any post–September
11 attack on Jews, when an explosion at a synagogue on the island of
Djerba killed 16 people.[26] Acts of violence and provocation began
to appear in Europe much earlier, and though less gruesome than the
murder in Pakistan, and less deadly than the attack in Tunisia, they
were far more plentiful. A Muslim sheikh based in London, for example,
recorded and distributed tapes immediately after September 11th calling
for violence against Jews and urging young boys to learn to use Kalashnikovs.[27]
There was an eruption of vandalism of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries
in Germany and Belgium.[28]

In October, vandals torched a Jewish elementary school in southern
France, leaving behind a spray-painted message reading “Death
to the Jews” and “bin Laden will conquer.”[29] The
French incident was part of a wave of more than 400 attacks in that
nation on rabbis, synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jewish students documented
in a report, “Les Antifeujs,” published in early March
by SOS Racisme and the Union of Jewish Students of France.[30] After
the report’s publication, the French violence seemed to escalate,
and the final weekend of March was marked by a burst of attacks: a
gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher shop near Toulouse, a young
Jewish couple were wounded in an attack in Villeurbanne, vandals set
fire to a synagogue in Strasbourg, and a dozen hooded attackers crashed
two cars through the main gate of a synagogue in Lyon, ramming one
vehicle into the temple’s main prayer hall and setting it on
fire.[31] These were followed by an organized attack on a Jewish soccer
team in a Paris suburb in April, which left one person hospitalized.
The young, masked attackers shouted “Death to Jews” as
they assaulted the soccer players with sticks and metal bars.[32]

But there is a critical component in the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence
documented in “Les Antifeujs,” as well as in the incidents
documented in a similar, global report from the Israel-based Stephen
Roth Institute: both tie the upsurge in hate crimes against Jews not
to the events of September 11th, but to a date a year earlier—the
beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada, and Israel’s brutal response.
In fact, those Lyon attackers were ramming their cars into the synagogue
at almost the exact moment that Israeli troops were breaking down the
walls of Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah—in other
words, the outbreak of violence that weekend in France closely matched
the intensification of Israeli assaults in the West Bank. The Stephen
Roth report documents more than 250 violent anti-Jewish attacks worldwide
in the weeks that immediately followed the outbreak of the intifada
in the final days of September 2000. “Up to October some 90 cases
of extreme right violence were recorded,” according to the report,
but “since October, Muslim activity has predominated. . . . [This
pattern] confirmed the potential of the Arab-Israeli conflict to escalate
ethno-religious enmity between Jews and Muslims worldwide.”[33]
The report reminds us of a similar upsurge in attacks on Jewish targets
in the early 1990s, at the beginning of the Gulf War, a conflict in
which the U.S.-Israeli relationship was seen by some to be central.

The ADL’s 2000 audit of anti-Jewish violence echoed this same
trend, with 259 incidents reported in October 2000, just after the
intifada began, far more than in any other single month that year.
At the time, ADL National Director Abe Foxman said, “When the
crisis in the Middle East reached a fever pitch, Jews around the world
and in the United States became targets for random acts of aggression
and violence,”[34] a comment that became even more apt in the
spring of 2002.

The question becomes: How do we interpret this violence and its relationship
to the Israel-Palestine conflict? Did “events in the Middle East
only set off [antisemitic hatred]” as Malek Boutih, president
of France’s SOS Racisme, said in March? As he went on to say, “There
is always a good reason to be anti-Semitic for those who want to be.”[35]
Or has the identification between the State of Israel and Jews as a
whole become so well established that these acts of violence should
be understood more specifically as expressions of rage over Israeli
policy? The evidence for both readings is fairly persuasive.

Strains of Classic Antisemitism

In addition to the international popularity of Jewish conspiracy theories
about September 11th, there are other signs that anti-Jewish sentiment
in Europe and the Arab world has strayed far from criticism of Israel
and squarely into the territory of classic European antisemitism. The
Saudi Arabian broadcast company, Arab Radio and Television, produced
a multimillion dollar 30-part dramatization of the classic anti-Jewish
forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in time for a 2002 Ramadan
broadcast, which according to Egyptian star Muhammad Subhi, “expos[es]
all the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that have been implemented
to date.”[36] A January 2002 article in the Egyptian government
weekly, Akher Sa'a headlined; “The Jews are Bloodsuckers and
Will Yet Conquer America,” and included such choice lines as “A
great danger threatens the United States of America. This great danger
is the Jew. . . . Why? Because they are vampires, and vampires cannot
live on other vampires.”[37] A December 2001 comedy sketch on
Dubai TV called “Terrorman,” depicted Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon drinking the blood of Arab children—a clear reference
to blood libel myths that date back to the medieval Crusades, while
cartoons in more than one Egyptian paper depicted the American Jewish
lobby through images of shrunken, groveling, hook-nosed Jews that could
have been lifted directly from Nazi literature.[38]

Here in the United States, Sheikh Muhammad Gemeaha, then imam of the
Kuwait-funded Islamic Cultural Center of New York City explained back
in October that “only the Jews” were capable of the September
11th attacks, and that “if it became known to the American people,
they would have done to the Jews what Hitler did.”[39]

Ali Abunimah, vice-president of the Chicago-based Arab American Action
Network, cautions that some of these translations are questionable.[40]
In fact, all of the above translations—with the exception of
the Gemeaha quote, which was verified by the New York Times—come
from the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based pro-Israel
outfit that a former CIA operative has called “selective . .
. propagandists.”[41] Abunimah also emphasizes that there are
sounder voices in the Arab and Muslim communities who try to challenge
these kinds of statements, and that some of the language about Muslims
and Arabs in the U.S. and Israeli press is equally vile.[42] And yet,
he says, “a lot of anti-Israeli sentiment is indeed mixed with
antisemitic rhetoric imported from the West.”[43]

As Martin Lee documented in a recent report for the Southern Poverty
Law Center, these images have not filtered into Arab culture by accident.
Alliances between Muslims and Nazis date back to the years before World
War II, when the grand mufti of Jerusalem sought an alliance with Nazi
Germany.[44] Since then there has been a history of Arab countries,
especially Egypt, providing safe haven for Nazis and neonazis; of freelance
neonazi shock troops joining the Palestinian and Iraqi causes; of wealthy
Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Libya financing American and European
neofascists; and of Holocaust denialists from the United States and
Europe seeking out audiences in the Arab world by sponsoring conferences
and translating and distributing literature. Lee calls it a “peculiar
bond” in its current form, that derives “in part from a
shared set of enemies: Jews, the United States, race-mixing, ethnic
diversity” and part from “the shared belief that they must
shield their own peoples from the corrupting influence of foreign cultures
and the homogenizing juggernaut of globalization.”[45] A key
figure in the current alliance is Swiss neonazi Ahmed Huber, who is
a director within Al Taqwa, the international banking group that apparently
helped to channel funds for Osama bin Laden’s operations.[46]

Israel and “the Jews”

At other times, antisemitism watchdogs may be reading sinister anti-Jewish
ideology into articles and illustrations in the Arab media that may
fairly be understood as straightforward criticism of Israeli militarism
and the Israel-U.S. alliance. “There’s this idea that all
of this anger must come from an external source, which is antisemitism,” says
Abunimah, and “that somehow the occupation and the butchery couldn’t
possibly explain the hostility toward Israel.”[47] Arab and Muslim
identification with the Palestinian cause is intense, to say the least:
popular demonstrations of outrage over Israeli aggression were so ferocious
and widespread in March that they nearly threatened to destabilize
the governments of Jordan and Egypt.

Take as an example, in this context, a cartoon posted on the ADL website
from the Palestinian paper Al-Ayyam, which pictures Vice-President
Dick Cheney with Stars of David reflected in his glasses. Does this
image, as the ADL suggests, “promote the anti-Semitic canard
that Jews control the U.S. government”? At one level, it does.
On the other hand, the United States has, until recently, vetoed every
UN resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories,
and Cheney himself has made remarks indicating, perhaps disingenuously,
that Israel’s interests are at the center of U.S. foreign policy
in the region, telling Sharon on March 25th that the United States
was planning to attack Iraq “first and foremost for Israel’s
sake.”[48] And how can one argue definitively that the Star of
David symbolizes Jews in general, rather than the Israeli State in
particular, when that symbol adorns the Israeli flag? As Abunimah points
out, “People see Palestinians being brutalized every night on
television, and the Apache helicopters being used in the attacks have
Stars of David on them. Israel is the one who attached an ancient symbol
to its violent, colonial operations.”[49]

Middle East expert Phyllis Bennis, a senior fellow with the Progressive
Policy Institute, describes the dynamic: “Israel the State, the
army, the occupation uses the language of being Jews a great deal,
and the symbols of being Jews, and often claims that what it does is
in the name of all Jews. And in the Arab world, particularly among
Palestinians, that language gets translated. So instead of saying, ‘The
Israelis came and shot up my house and arrested my brother,’ they
say, ‘The Jews came. . .’ At a certain point it gets to
be too much. Traveling there, I sometimes say, ‘You know, I’m
Jewish,’ and they reply, ‘But you’re from New York!’ For
them ‘the Jews’ means ‘the Israelis.’”[50]

This identification between Jews and Israel is reinforced by Israeli
leaders and by most of the major Jewish organizations in the United
States. At the height of Israeli incursions into the West Bank this
spring, Sharon called the troop actions “a battle for the survival
of the Jewish people.”[51] Here at home, ADL’s Abe Foxman,
is fond of saying “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, period,”[52]
while the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations push
a hawkish pro-Israel politics on Capitol Hill that is out of step with
the propeace American Jewish majority—despite the fact that the
conference claims to represent the entire American Jewish community.[53]

In any case it needs to be said: Though identification with Israel
is at least as intense for many Jews as identification with Palestine
is for many Arabs, not all Israelis and diasporic Jews support the
occupation or Sharon’s escalating brutality. A recent Ma’ariv
poll showed that 63 per cent of Israelis support a ceasefire and a
peace agreement that would establish a Palestinian state;[54] 45 per
cent even support the evacuation of all Jewish settlements in order
to accomplish this end, and support for Sharon has hovered between
35 and 62 per cent in 2002, hardly a ringing endorsement. Even as civilian
Israeli casualties began to mount last fall, a poll by the New York-based
Jewish Forward found that 51 per cent of respondents identified with
Israeli “doves” rather than Israeli “hawks.”[55]

Distinctions like these are easily lost in regions where the only
encounters people have with Jews are shots of Israeli soldiers on the
evening news. Mohammed Fadel, a member of the post-9/11 New York City-based
organization, Muslims Against Terrorism, and a specialist in Islamic
law, says that Egyptians of his father’s generation had Jewish
neighbors, colleagues, and schoolmates, and there were Jews in prominent
positions in the government—but that’s no longer the case. “One
of the unintended consequences of Zionism,” Fadel argues, “is
that you no longer have a social presence of Jews in the Arab world.
And without any kind of reality check in society to limit the tendency
of people to view their enemies in the worst possible way, it’s
not hard to understand how antisemitic rhetoric can grow and spread.”[56]

The increase in anti-Jewish violence over the past year and a half
indicates that the tight identification of Israel with world Jewry
has converted Jewish institutions, not just Israeli ones, into targets
of violence. According to the Stephen Roth report, “In contrast
to former Arab-Israeli clashes, the main targets of these attacks were
not institutions identified with the State of Israel, but Jews and
Jewish sites.”[57] But while this identification is indeed propagated
by racist neonazis, in their obsession with the so-called Zionist Occupation
Government (ZOG), and by anti-Jewish propaganda in the Arab world,
it is being forged in equal part by major Jewish organizations in the
diaspora, and by the State of Israel itself.

The Silence of the Left

One might hope that the Left would be helping to disentangle this
morass, by protesting Israeli incursions on the one hand and antisemitic
attacks on the other, and helping to break down the identification
of “Jews” with “Israel.” But outside of the
Jewish Left, that is rarely the case.

In France, protests of the rising anti-Jewish violence have been attended
primarily by Jews, but with significant support from Muslim organizations
and Left activists from antiracist groups such as SOS Racisme. But
such instances of left-wing solidarity are not widespread. Just after
Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the racist National Front, came in second
in the first round of France’s presidential balloting, Naomi
Klein, a chronicler of the anti-corporate globalization movement, wrote
the following in the London Guardian: “I couldn’t help
thinking about the recent events I’ve been to where anti-Muslim
violence was rightly condemned, Ariel Sharon deservedly blasted, but
no mention was made of attacks on Jewish synagogues, cemeteries and
community centers. Or about the fact that every time I log on to activist
news sites like Indymedia.org which practice ‘open publishing,’ I
am confronted with a string of Jewish conspiracy theories about September
11 and excerpts from the Protocol of the Elders of Zion.”[58]
A recent glance at the Jerusalem Indy Media site also revealed an article
by racist former Klansman David Duke, identifying him only as a former
member of the Louisiana state Legislature.[59]

Far from issuing overt expressions of solidarity against antisemitism,
many on the Left have attempted to turn concern over antisemitism on
its head. On the same Indy Media site, one encounters a graphic described
as a “Zionazi flag” that flashes the Nazi flag and the
Israeli flag with an equal sign in between.[60]

Similar images appeared on dozens of handmade flags and signs at a
massive demonstration in Washington DC in late April against the Israeli
occupation, where protesters also chanted “Sharon and Hitler,
they’re the same; the only difference is the name.”[61]
In February, demonstrators in France carried signs reading “Sionisme
= Nazisme.”[62] A March 2002 email from a Pakistani progressive
reads in part, “Looking at Sharon’s tanks going into Ramallah
brings to my mind Hitler’s invasion of Poland. . . . The Israelis
are behaving like Nazis now.”[63] This language has become commonplace.

Leftists could be seeing in Israel’s incursions the brutality
of the Soviet Union, whose tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, or the
bloody violence of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. But they
do not. Instead, leftists around the globe choose to compare Israel
with Nazi rule, a choice that contains at least a hint of an attack
against the Jewish experience.

Author and activist Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz a member since its inception
of the Middle East peace group Women in Black, says, “I’ve
been uncomfortable with the Nazi language around the conflict for years.
It feels like a desperate attempt to shake Jews loose from their identity
as victims.”[64] The complication, as she points out, is that
Israelis, too, have wrapped themselves in the language of the Holocaust
in order to explain their military aggression. Undeniably, for Jews,
this connection has an emotional basis in the deep-seated fear and
anxiety produced by the Holocaust, and in the intense post-Holocaust
yearning for a safe haven. But, decades after the end of Nazism, the
idea that Israel is the one bulwark against threats to Jewish safety
came to be used more cynically, as well. Peter Novick writes in The
Holocaust and American Life that it was in the wake of the 1967 war,
and especially after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, that “[Israeli]
conflicts were endowed with all the black-and-white moral clarity of
the Holocaust, which came to be, for the Israeli cause, what Israel
was said to be for the United States—a strategic asset.”[65]

With Israel using the Holocaust to justify its military aggressions,
the temptation has clearly become strong, within the movement against
the occupation, to take that moral authority away. The trouble is this
gesture has far too much in common with the work of Holocaust denialists—usually
overt antisemites—who try to paint the Holocaust as a victimization
myth invented by Jews in order to veil Jewish power or to make false
claims to being God’s chosen people.[66] If advocates of Palestinian
rights hope to free themselves of charges of antisemitism, they must
find ways to condemn the occupation that avoid any attempt to erase
the violent and traumatic history of the persecution of Jews—or
better yet, take a stand against antisemitism themselves. “It
is precisely because anti-Semitism is used and abused by the likes
of Sharon,” writes Naomi Klein, “that the fight against
it must be reclaimed.”[67]

Sorting it Out

The debate in Europe over the significance of the recent anti-Jewish
violence highlights some of the truly difficult questions in understanding
antisemitism during this period. In the wake of an attack on a German
synagogue with explosives in late March 2002, local police said they
were investigating both the German Racist Right and the possibility
of “Arab terrorism,” while Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate
dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called for an investigation into
possible contacts between the two—each response reflecting a
sense that the attack may be linked to deep historic currents of German
antisemitism.[68] On the other hand, a significant leader in the French
Jewish community, Theo Klein, argued that the anti-Jewish attacks there
were not an antisemitic wave with ties to Europe’s Nazi past,
but a spontaneous outburst by frustrated immigrants living on the fringes
of society—many of whom are frequent targets of racial violence
themselves. A former French Resistance fighter, Klein emphasizes that
the State has condemned, rather than endorsed, the attacks on Jews:
Police guard synagogues, while presidential candidates—with the
exception of the Far Rightist Jean Marie Le Pen—outdo each other
in expressing outrage at the violence.[69]

In late February 2002, Ariel Sharon remarked that with “the
wave of dangerous anti-Semitism sweeping France . . . [French] Jewry
could find itself facing great danger” and announced that Israel
was preparing to welcome Jewish immigrants,[70] and several British
and French intellectuals echoed Sharon’s alarm. But others have
argued that the furor over antisemitism has wrongly conflated the reprehensible
acts of violence with what one journalist called “one of the
most vigorous media critiques of Israel’s policies in the European
media in a generation.”[71] As Peter Beaumont wrote in the London-based
Observer, “For while the phenomenon of anti-Jewish sentiment
and attacks in some quarters of the Islamic community in Europe is
to be deplored, so too must be the effort to co-opt it as an alibi
for Israel’s behaviour and to use it to silence opposition to
its policies.”[72]

As this article goes to press, Israeli aggression in the West Bank,
and Palestinian suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, continue,
with the horrible, lopsided death toll growing weekly. So, too, have
attacks on Jews and Jewish religious institutions continued to escalate
in France and Germany, and new reports have emerged of anti-Jewish
attacks in Russia. One critical challenge for the Jewish community,
and progressives everywhere, in responding to these situations in the
months ahead is to reject fear-mongering by pro-Israeli sectors in
the face of increasingly harsh international criticism of Israeli actions;
to assert the distinction—rather than the identity—between
Jews everywhere and the Israeli State; and yet to forcefully challenge
truly antisemitic acts and statements wherever they occur. An end to
the occupation would certainly clarify matters. As Klein said recently, “When
a political solution for the Middle East conflict can be found, and
a viable Palestinian state coexists with Israel, then we shall see
that the Muslim community in no way cherishes the anti-Semitic hatred
that characterized the Fascist movement in France and Europe before
1950.”[73] If he is wrong, and attacks against Jews continue,
then at least their nature will be abundantly clear.

A second challenge is to constantly test the lens through which Jewish
victimization is being seen. “Any effective framework,” says
Kaye/Kantrowitz, “must allow us to really see what’s happening
to people, and who is really at risk.”[74] A vision of contemporary
Jewish vulnerability that does not allow us to acknowledge the daily
brutality being experienced by Palestinians under occupation, or the
intensity of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence in the United States
since September 11th is simply not adequate. Nor is one that refuses
to take at least some solace in the Muslim groups who marched in solidarity
with Jews to protest the antisemitic attacks in France, or the quiet
but persistent Jewish-Muslim interfaith work that has taken place almost
monthly in New York City, ground zero, since the World Trade Center
towers collapsed. Timor Yuskaev, an academic fellow at the Interfaith
Center of New York, speculates that, “In the long run, this is
possibly a much more lasting legacy of the attacks.”[75] Perhaps
he is being too hopeful. But alarmism has its dangers as well.

Esther Kaplan is an activist, writer, and radio producer. She is cochair
of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a New York City-based social
justice organization, and the cohost of Beyond the Pale, a Jewish public
affairs program on WBAI radio in New York.

[15] The Pakistani media often collectively terms Islamic fundamentalist
groups in that country as jihadi groups. The JUI (F) is a splinter
group of the JUI headed by Maulana Fazlur Rehman. The JUI is a political
party whose leaders are Islamic clergy.